The 13th (18 page)

“The guests are arriving,” Amelia announced. She stepped around the corner from the stairway, two-inch black heels clicking on the stone floor of the basement as she came.

Rockford looked up from his study of the baby in crèche two and grinned. “It’s almost time. I can hardly believe it. It seems like we’ve been getting ready for this forever.”

She sidled up to him and licked a lobe of his ear as a hand caressed his back. “Everything is ready in the chapel,” she promised. “The candles are lit, the food is ready…there is wine and rum and every other liquor under the sun.”

Rockford laughed. “Let the orgy begin!”

Amelia stepped between him and the baby. She took his hands into hers and stared up into his eyes. Even now, more than a year after she’d first met him, those eyes still made her thighs tremble. So hard, so powerful. And she had won that power for her own. Tonight was the proof.

“This is the best place, the only place we could hold this ceremony,” she said. “Thank you for bringing me here.” Her voice betrayed the seriousness of her intent. “They failed here, twenty-five years ago, but they were amateurs. We are more prepared. We are ready. And the residue of the souls they spilled
still permeates the walls of this very building like blood. It will bolster our own effort, to help make our offering a success.”

“They did something right last time,” Rockford said. “Because whatever they called through, never completely left. We’ve been seeing ghosts since the day we walked into this place.”

“Lower-level devils,” she agreed. “But not Ba’al or Astarte. Not the incantations of the Thirteenth.”

He pointed at the row of baby incubators against the wall. “Well, we’re ready to call Astarte and Ba’al to incorporate all the way this time. We have the blood, and the wine, and the excess. We have the mothers, and the babies. And the Thirteenth. Now all we need are our guests.”

Amelia’s eyes sparkled in the dull candlelight. “I’ll send them down,” she promised.

When she walked away, Rockford couldn’t help but follow the shapely curve of her ass through the black satin fabric of her ceremonial robe. It trailed low to her ankles, and even had a hood in the back, which she still wore down. But what made it really work for Amelia was the way she draped it around her. She didn’t just wear the robe, it wore her. She’d tied a sash tight around her waist, accentuating her curves. From the thick golden rope that rippled against her belly hung a half dozen small white pendants. If you’d looked closer, you would have seen that they were actually skulls. Human skulls.

And if you’d looked even closer, you’d have seen that they weren’t simply replicas of human skulls, they were actual denuded bone. They were not fully formed, and ranged in size from a pebble to a shot glass, yet each one hung and jangled against each other at her hips like a ghastly wind chime.

Rockford shook his head, as he remembered
harvesting and helping her cure each tiny head for her ceremonial outfit. These were no ordinary ornaments of death.

These were the skulls of fetuses, taken from their mothers while still alive.

Of course, by the end, neither mother nor fetus had lived to tell tales. Each one of them lay in waiting just down the hall, their bodies acid-washed, but their souls ready to be released in calling.

Rockford turned his attention back to the babies who waited for the night. He reached in a hand to one of the cradles and thumbed the infant’s chin thoughtfully as it gurgled and stared at him with wide dark eyes.

“Tonight’s the night, little guy,” he said. “Goo-chi-goo-chi-goo.”

David pulled the hand brake and slowed the bike as he approached the turnoff for Castle Lodge. Traffic tonight had been heavy for the ridge, and the last five cars that had passed him had turned onto the gravel road that led to the asylum.

Something was up tonight.

Peering behind him to make sure no cars were approaching, he turned onto the narrow road and stared down the lane. Through the protective screen of the trees, he could make out the glow of brake lights ahead. After a moment, they went out, and the path turned to unbreachable shadow again.

He preferred the shadow. The red light only meant that Brenda and now Christy were in trouble.
Something was about to change. There was a gathering here tonight. And David didn’t like the import of what that could mean for the women behind the thirteen doors.

Women that included Brenda. And now Christy.

Cautiously he pedaled down the lane, cringing at the crunch of the wheels on gravel. He imagined they could hear his approach inside the doors of the asylum. And then the beams of another pair of headlights out on 190 filtered through the trees to light the way ahead of him, and David swore. He leaped off the bike while it was still in motion and pulled it down to hide in the tall grass of the ditch beside the gravel road. His groundskeeping work hadn’t extended yet all the way to the highway, and he thanked God for that as he lay flat on the earth, hidden by a two-foot-high stand of grass and weeds. The headlights had turned onto the lane and shivered and bounced as the car crunched down the narrow rutted road toward him.

Was it his imagination, or was the car slowing as it approached? He hugged the ground tighter, willing his body to sink into the warm earth. His breath caught as the car reached his hiding place, headlights blinding as twin suns in the pitch of night. His heart stopped for a moment as the car seemed to slow further, but then it was easing past, and as David looked up, he recognized the black-and-white panels of a police squad.

Straining to see inside the car as it passed, he just barely made out that there were two heads in the front of the squad, and the one in the passenger seat, closest to him, looked disturbingly familiar.

A woman’s curly gray hair shone briefly in the light reflected off the forest leaves, and David bit his tongue from calling out, “Aunt Elsie?”

And then the car was gone, and pulling into an
empty space amid a row of cars now lining the front entryway of the asylum. In a moment, the echo of two car doors slamming shut filled the air, and David could just barely make out the silhouettes of two figures walking up the steps of the asylum. For a moment the front columns of the old hotel were bathed in light as the door opened, and then with a snap, the two figures were gone, and David’s eyes struggled to adjust again to the subtle shades of night.

He pulled his bike out of the weeds and slowly pedaled a few more yards along the gravel path before stopping again. The unkempt weeds changed to mowed grass, and the forest retreated from the edge of the road as the path opened to the circular drive of the entry gardens of the old hotel. Realizing that he couldn’t exactly ride his bike right up to the front door, David stepped off, and rolled the bike down into the ditch a second time, laying it down in the first stand of uncut grass.

There were at least a dozen cars parked in front of the asylum, more than he had ever seen. They filled the open space that ringed the topiary garden in the center of the circle drive. David slipped away from the visible entryway though, and stole around the back of the hotel past his gardener’s shed to the back door. There were more lights on than usual inside, he noticed, and the wells that protected the basement windows glowed.

What the fuck was going on in there tonight? The image of Dr. Rockford’s bloodied hands raised into the air after reaching inside the womb of a woman in the basement flashed across the back of his eyes and David cringed.

His hand shook as he pressed the key into the back door of the asylum. He held his breath as he turned the knob and eased the door open.

But he needn’t have worried about making noise. As soon as the door opened, the din of voices spilled into the night around him. Still, David was careful as he pulled the door shut behind him.

He stole along the wall of art toward the center of the asylum, and the pictures seemed to leer at him with the echo of conversations ahead. One in particular caught his eye. The new one, with its garish color splash, a crimson wound that looked something like a baby…and something like roadkill.

Its distorted eyes shone like black marbles in the dim light, and the skin of David’s neck crawled when he looked at it.

There were people milling about in the center reception area of the old hotel, just at the base of the winding stairs that led to second floor. The floor where Brenda was. There was no way he could reach her now, David realized. All he could do was wait.

Slipping down to a crouch, he leaned against the wall and bit his tongue. In front of him, people milled about, sipping from wineglasses and filling the room with the din of excited conversation. It looked like it could be a long wait.

Heart pounding, and stomach clenched with concern, David wondered how long he could stay secreted here, before he couldn’t wait any longer. He
had
to get to Brenda…but the only way was through a crowd of people. He supposed he could just join the mob and pretend to be one of them…but to walk up the stairs in full view of a couple dozen people? No way.

Frustrated, David pursed his lips, and leaned against the wall to wait.

But he didn’t wait long.

A shrill whistle cut the air. The hall suddenly quieted. David looked up for the source, and there was
the granite-faced doctor himself, standing at the railing of the second-floor landing.

Rockford.

The fraud wore his white doctor’s coat, and his face beamed as he looked out over the crowd. Nurse Amelia stood at his side, a vision in black. Where Rockford looked austere and upstanding, dark pants sheathed in the trustworthy garments of the physician, Amelia was decked out in the raiment of a goth queen. Her raven hair slid down the black lace that edged a midnight dress. The lace slid across her neckline to plunge across highly visible cleavage. The body-hugging fabric clung to and accentuated the curve of her ass, and outlined the flare of her hips. Her waist was ringed in the homemade belt of baby skulls, which rattled and shifted with her every move.

The dress barely crept lower than her ass, where it gave way to a tantalizing meld of white thigh and black fishnet.

David caught his breath in spite of himself. He’d always thought she was attractive in the times he’d seen her in her nurse’s smock, but now, with eyes smudged in dark shadow and hips hugged tight, he realized that Amelia was not just cute…she was smoking hot.

“Thank you all for coming tonight,” Rockford called out over the crowd. As Rockford began to talk, a girl decked out in a skintight skein of black even racier than Amelia’s cycled through the crowd, retrieving wineglasses and placing them on a circular plastic tray she balanced high in the air. David thought her lips looked coated not in lipstick, but in blood.

“It has been twenty-five years since Castle House Lodge lived. You all know what happened then. Morgan attempted to stage the ceremony of the
Thirteenth, and while he certainly succeeded in spilling plenty of blood here, he ultimately failed to complete the ritual. Tonight, what failed here then, will succeed. Amelia and I have followed every letter of the ritual up to now. The women in our asylum all carry children.

“And tonight, their blood will provide the passage for Ba’al and Astarte. At last, after thousands of years, the mother and the father, sister and brother, will be joined as one, incorporated in our child.

“The Thirteenth.”

The throng below him began to applaud, and David realized then that he recognized many of them. Not all by name, but he’d seen most of them in town over the past few weeks.

Erin, the druggist from the pharmacy. Mr. Cleary, the manager down at the grocery. And…it pained him to recognize, when he thought to look…Aunt Elsie, standing in the midst of the throng, tilting back a glass of amber wine and laughing as she spoke to a tall man in a white butcher’s apron.

David realized the man wore a belt beneath the apron, and the glint of steel implements hanging from a sheath on his belt shone as he joined Elsie in laughing at some shared jibe.

“And now,” Rockford continued, “it’s time for us to begin. Over the next hour, we will make our twelve offerings to Ba’al and Astarte, and at thirteen o’clock—the stroke of one A.M.—we will consummate the creation of that which you have all dreamed of for half of your lives. We are ready to bring them into the world, at last, to share in the flesh that they have celebrated since the dawn of time. Please, let Angeline lead you downstairs so that we can begin. After far too long, I’m pleased to tell you now…it is time.”

The waitressing girl set down her platter of empty
glasses at the reception window of the main office, and then strode through the crowd like a minx, shifting and bouncing her hips provocatively as she stalked straight toward the door marked with an unmistakable red
X.
In moments, the crowd began to follow her lead, and a stream of bodies disappeared from the main foyer of the asylum to its hidden depths.

In minutes, the entire throng had left the main room of the asylum, and David found himself alone, crouching in silence.

He hadn’t noticed when Rockford and Amelia had joined the throng, but he assumed they had gone through the red
X
as well. After all, the action was clearly slated to occur downstairs…Which led David to wonder if there was anyone left to rescue upstairs.

“Shit, shit, shit,” he mumbled, and forced himself up from his crouch to tiptoe through the center room and up the stairs.

As he cautiously placed his foot on the first step, a noise interrupted the sudden quiet and he froze, sweat breaking out instantly on his brow.

The noise rumbled louder, and then broke. Then it happened again—almost like the sound of a faraway crowd at a sporting arena.

Below the stairs, the throng was cheering.

David reaffirmed his haste and instead of tiptoeing up the stairs, he kicked into gear and took them two at a time.

He wasn’t surprised when he threw open the doors to rooms one, two and three and found them empty. But he moved faster down the hallway then, and grew more nervous as four, five and six also lacked a woman in the rooms’ beds. After he discovered room seven was empty he skipped straight down the hall to eleven.

Empty.

They’d already taken her downstairs, along with all the rest of the women. David didn’t want to think about what they were going to do to her. What they might already have done.

Below the floor, another cheer reverberated.

Shit,
David thought. He couldn’t just walk in front of a mob of bloodthirsty devil worshippers and steal away their victims right before their eyes. He’d been hoping to slip her out the back door without notice. But now?

Maybe they would have robes or something, he hoped, imagining a druidic rite. After all, they were down there to worship demons, weren’t they?

He slipped quickly down the carpeted stairs, and then stepped more slowly down the first steps to the basement. When he reached the bottom, he took a deep breath, and then stuck his head around the doorway to look into the open room.

Getting through the crowd unnoticed was going to be more difficult than he’d thought.

They weren’t wearing black robes and hoods, like demon worshippers in some dark Hammer horror movie would.

They weren’t wearing anything at all.

The floor near the entrance was piled high with discarded shirts and shoes and pants. And the room was filled with naked or nearly naked people, in various states of carnal excitement. He pulled his head back and considered his options.

He wasn’t going to doff his clothes to join the crowd, but he couldn’t walk through them fully dressed.

The stairwell echoed with another cheer and David’s stomach quailed. Not from the cheer, but from what came before it.

A woman’s scream.

David knew without a doubt that it was just the first of many. And sooner or later, it would be the screams of Brenda and Christy.

“Raise your glasses to the sky,” called out a voice from somewhere around the corner. “Speak his name: Ba’al!”

David peered around the wall again and saw the crowd following the command, wineglasses glittering with ruby and gold sloshing and dripping on the bodies below as they raised their hands as one, swaying together and calling out again and again: “Ba’al.”

There were still some women and a couple men in the throng who wore shorts and sandals, and David made up his mind. With a silent gulp, he pulled his T-shirt over his head, and balled it up in one hand. Then he steeled himself and slipped into the room, carefully positioning himself in the back of the crowd, behind the hairy buttocks and back of a fat fortysomething man who was far too busy pawing the equally naked (but most oppositely nonhairy) ass of a younger woman at his side. She slid her free hand through the fur of his apelike back and knocked her hips to his as she steadily tilted and emptied her glass of red wine.

When it was empty, she put her mouth to his ear and whispered something, and his mouth met hers in a wet animal kiss before he showed a swath of wide yellow teeth at her and relieved her of the empty glass.

He disappeared to their left, leaving David with a clearer view of the front of the room, and he instantly regretted the clarity.

To the left of the basement stairs stood Rockford and Amelia. Both remained dressed, though the doctor’s white coat was already smeared with blood across his chest. The reason struggled in his hands.

She was dark-haired, with skin of almond…breasts were full but small, and the shiny black thatch of her pubic mound glimmered in the uneven light of the flickering candles. But the beauty of her nakedness was not what drew David’s eyes.